Remembering the Strangeness

It is called adjustment.
Every two years or so,
after we had lived
the strangeness off the walls
and floors, we watched our things
onto a van and set off
to keep an appointment with them at another cheaper place,
which spoke in untamed tongues
to us and breathed fresh paint,
stale soap, and ghosts of dinners past
in our faces when we entered:
another house to try to make home
before the two-year lease expired.
We tamed the echose with
our rugs and drapes; we added
our own brew of odors;
we let our beds, bookcases
claim the rooms as ours. But
we never liked the way
the stairway turned; or we asked
how anyone could live
with that window where it was.
Never would the house be ours.

But there was this: the thrill
of starting over -- new scenes
from every window; the search
for secret doors and tunnels;
the dreadful cellar, damp and dark,
spider-horrid, smelling of cement,
but empty, irresistible;
the arid attic, hoarding
summer's heat and winter's cold,
its not-quite-finished floor
and sloping roof angling to jaws
and an open throat, down which
a marble rolled once -- gone,
no doubt, to the center of the
Earth and where a small boy,
if he weren't careful, might
likewise go. And there was this:
the fairground dazzle of the
unfamiliar neighborhood --
from the gaudy bedspread on the line
next door, to the local bus
that rumbled past our house,
startling as a steamboat.
And there were these: reports,
savory as fresh-baked rolls
and served at supper, detailing
the day's discoveries
of the street or woods or field.

I can not get enough
of strangeness now, it seems,
when repetition
feeds only hunger for
the unexpected, the unique.
From a winsow
of the daily bus, I explore
each passed side street, abduct
sufficient strangers to populate
a reverie, search fields
to find some tree with magic
of the unfamiliar in it, and look
for houses that I never lived in --
imagining how
they would have felt to me,
a child in those moving years,
countless wonders past,
and remembering
the touch of each place,
as alien as whetstone to the blade.